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The legacies of Eqbal Ahmad

M J Shenoy in Amherst, Massachusetts

Writer, academic and social activist Eqbal Ahmad will be remembered on September 17 and 18 when radical and Leftist students, academics and activists will recall his legacy.

Ahmad, an outspoken critic of the American war against Vietnam, and a relentless critic of Third World orthodoxy, was one of the few Pakistanis to denounce the death threat against novelist Salman Rushdie. In 1972, along with several other Leftists, he was charged in a plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Ahmad and the alleged co-conspirators were acquitted after a well-publicized trial.

He died in May in an Islamabad hospital of complications following an operation for colon cancer a week earlier. He was 66.

"He had a prodigiously detailed knowledge of history, whether that of the United States, the Islamic world, or newly-independent countries, always severely measuring the generous promise of religion and nationalism against their depredations and abuse as their proponents descended into fundamentalism, chauvinism and provincialism," his friend, admirer and fellow socialist, Professor Edward Said of Columbia University wrote in an obituary.

"Radiating an aura of profound peace and the understanding that comes with inner reconciliation and harmony from his small, trim figure, Ahmad was nevertheless a fierce, often angry, combatant against what he perceived as human cruelty and perversity. An indefatigable teacher, during the last years of his life he dedicated himself -- quixotically, it sometimes appears -- to the creation of an alternative university in Pakistan (Khalduniyah), named after the great Arab polymath and historian whose comprehensive view of the human adventure Ahmad sought to embody in a new curriculum based in the modern humanities, social and natural sciences."

Many of his friends all over the world were conscripted into prospective service as professors and trustees, everyone fully convinced that the ideal was both impossible and attainable.

Born in Bihar, he and his siblings left for Pakistan in l948; before that, his father was murdered in bed over a land dispute as the boy lay next to him. Eqbal would occasionally cite this traumatic event when he attacked material acquisitiveness of any kind, a passion he had purged from his soul.

In Lahore, he attended the Foreman Christian College, became an army officer for a short period, then came to the US in the mid-fifties as a Rotary Fellow in American History at Occidental College, California. From there he entered Princeton in l958 as a graduate student with a Proctor Fellowship and a double major in political science and Middle Eastern Studies under Philip Hitti.

During his Princeton years (Ph D l965), he went to Algeria, joined the FLN and became an associate of Franz Fanon, was arrested in France, established a cultural centre in Tunis, and first travelled in Morocco, where he is still remembered by leading intellectuals.

During the sixties he taught at Cornell for three years, as well as at Chicago, but, ever the unconventional scholar, he was among the first Fellows of the anti-war Washington Institute of Policy Studies, a Leftist think-tank.

In l969 he married Julie Diamond, a teacher and writer from New York; their daughter Dohra, now a graduate student at Columbia, was born in l971. Between l973 and l975, Ahmad established and headed the IPS's offshoot in Amsterdam, the Transnational Institute.

He was an early and prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and rather spectacularly, in l970, was indicted and put on trial along with the Berrigan brothers for a conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger. His defence cost him dearly, even though he and his alleged co-conspirators were, in the spring of l972, acquitted of all charges.

He was an untenured professor at various universities until l982 when Hampshire College, a small institution in Massachusetts, made him a professor; he taught there until he became emeritus professor in l997, splitting his time between there and Pakistan.

The event in his memory is to be held at Hampshire College will start at 4 pm with Agha Shahid Ali's reading of Faiz Ahmed Faiz at 4.30 pm. Edward Said will give the annual Eqbal Ahmad lecture, his topic being Embattled Landscapes, Unresolved Geographies.

On September 18, the events begin at 9:00 am; Dohra Ahmad will recall Ahmad's days at Hampshire College. Said will talk on Struggles for Liberation, Visions of Justice, along with Radha Kumar. Ahmad's political and intellectual legacy will be discussed by before lunch.

Included in the afternoon's program are talks on Confronting Empire, Building Solidarity, Khalduniyah: Knowledge, Power and Responsibility, Struggles for Peace and Justice In South Asia, Eqbal Ahmad: The Teacher.

For more information, contact Yogesh Chandrani, Assistant Director, Five College Program In Peace & World Security Studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002 Tel: (413) 559 5367; Fax: (413) 559 5611.

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